According to Daniel, Pip’s home is the Dreamer residence at 215 Sim Lane. The girl lives here with her parents and maternal grandfather. There are also an aunt and uncle, about whom Daniel doesn’t remember more than that they exist, and a paternal grandfather, who lives elsewhere in Pleasantview. The house looks no different from all the other homes in town. It is kept tidy and decorated for Halloween. A garden in the backyard is testament to at least one resident’s nature enthusiasm. Nothing on the outside indicates that nefarious schemes are happening here.
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Gavin takes a quick look at the surroundings in batform. He gives his report in a chirpy fruitbat voice, clearly having trouble to speak as a bat. In fact, to anybody outside the DPD Gavin the bat sounds completely unintelligible.
“There are still so many questions”, Hank says. “Pip has more or less confessed that she is behind the whaling scenario, but how? Children cannot split their souls. Even if she’d been the most powerful spellcaster or vampire in a previous life, now she is stuck in a pre-pubescent body that simply cannot access occult powers.”
“Other than lava bombs.”
“Other than lava bombs, correct, Tina. Let’s hope we won’t have to face some tonight.”
Hank’s total lack of sarcasm when he says this doesn’t bode well…
“Enchanting is the rarest and most complicated magical art”, Hank continues.
There is a moment of silence, when this truth fully sinks in. Because the two enchanters in question are Daniel’s goddaughter and Sigstein Connor. One or both men may still play the DPD for fools. If it turns out to be Sigstein, the investigators are equipped to deal with the betrayal. But if it’s Daniel, then Hank and Gavin, who have put their careers on stake for him in the past, are guilty of the worst of misjudgments.
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“Good evening, Mr. And Mrs. Dreamer…”
“Mister Reed! Is this a home visit? Lotti isn’t in trouble…?”
But what are the chances of that, if their daughter’s teacher is accompanied by not one policeman, but a whole squad ranging from beat cops to paranormal investigators?
“Uh… In what ways is Lotti in trouble, Mister Reed?”
While Daniel talks to the Dreamers, Gavin assigns tasks to the rest of the team. They agree to let Hank to the talking.
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“We’re investigating a case of artifact misuse and have reason to assume that your daughter has come into contact with – or possession of – an enchanted book. But first tell me, are any of you spellcasters?”
“No, Officer.”
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“We shouldn’t take their words on that.”
With these words Sigstein takes a potion bottle out of his backpack. What he needs now is the ability to spot magic auras. There are various ways to accomplish that and gulping down a potion in the background is the least intrusive one. Unlike a spell cast on the Dreamer couple it doesn’t require their consent either. Hypocritically as that sounds, thus is the law.
After having imbibed the bottle’s contents, Sigstein looks around. But the only golden aureola he spots is the one around his own head.
“Stupid potion”, the spellcaster mutters. “I know I am magical. Who wouldn’t be aware of their own magic powers?!”
On first glance nothing sticks out as being out of the ordinary. This is the domain of a child that still gets outfitted in the generic baby pink by her parents for the most part, but who has started developing her own preferences, now that she attends school and broadens her horizon.
Daniel smiles when he notices a red toy chopper resting on Pip’s treasure chest. Pip has built that one in his class, that is, Daniel had handed each child a bag of parts that they had painted and put together. The teacher then had slotted a tiny engine and two batteries in. Daniel still remembers the color each child has chosen, and who has given their chopper a name, but he couldn’t on top of his head cite his students’ classroom performance.
“Mister Reed!“ Pip gasps upon seeing Daniel. “And Mister Reed…”
The unspoken question is easy to decipher: Have Mister and Mister Reed swung by tonight, a teacher somewhat disgruntled by Pip’s misdeed and his husband? Or is it rather Mister Reed the teacher and POLICE CAPTAIN Reed? There being a whole squad of cops strongly suggests the second. In fact, there seems to be no end to policemen entering the room!
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“I’m so sorry, Mister Reed”, Pip says in a small voice. “I shouldn’t have abducted you. But I didn’t know that would happen! That I’d snatch you of all people!”
“Pip… Kidnapping people isn’t less bad when you do it to strangers!”
Calmly, patiently Daniel reminds the girl that she knows how he feels after getting shanghait to the Pequod, and he makes sure to use this exact word instead of variations of “abducted”. He goes on explaining that her other victims, the ones she’s never met before, are feeling the same. Eventually it sinks in. Pip agrees to apologize to everyone she has forced to play Captain Ahab with her.
Daniel looks up, into his husband’s face, who nods solemnly. From listening to Daniel talk to Pip, they all have come to the same conclusion: Pippilotta isn’t aware of what exactly she has done. Especially she cannot even imagine that her involuntary playmates have died every time the Pequod sank in the dreamscape. It is better if she never learns of that cruel detail.
“That won’t be necessary”, Daniel tells Pip. “Or, what I mean is, you meeting everyone in person won’t be required. But you will write a long letter in which you apologize, young lady! And before you do that, pray tell us how did you do all of this?”
“I just wished for it to happen.”
Danggit. Up to this point it had went so well, but now the detectives are stuck again. No matter how they phrase their questions, or what angles they come up with to build bridges for the suspect, Pip simply cannot explain what exactly she has done to give her wish that much power.
Hank picks it up from the desk, closed, with a bookmark shoved in at the actual start of the story, after the preliminary poems and author’s musings. But just like Pip, the book itself doesn’t register as magical. The captives haven’t really been inside a book, but in a self-contained universe inspired by the Captain Ahab story.
“Maybe next time the Dreamers should get her something more age appropriate”, Hank says. “There must be child-friendly versions of this story aplenty?”
“I think it was a great version!” Gavin protests. “With the pirate gold, a fire mage and a necromancer! I’d buy a copy for our own children, if only all of them weren’t cursed at the moment! The books, I mean, not my kids.”
WHAM!
Hank playfully slaps the younger Captain with the book.
“They’re cursed with having you for their father, goofball!”
Gavin recognizes the mockery as friendly, but protests again nonetheless: “Hey!!!”
“That was the original goofball! You and Sigstein only made it sound like fantasy, because you never deigned actually reading it and so all you knew was Ahab bad, Moby bad, Starbuck exists.”
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Hank has a point, of course, but that point isn’t helping them now.
Sigstein looks around… Somewhere in this room might be the solution to their case. But how is he to find it? In a little girl’s domain? The spellcaster never was a little girl himself.
“That’s exactly it”, Scheisserle supplies. “Look for something that’s out of place.”
“How? If I can’t even tell what would be in-of-place here?”
“Look for something that speaks to YOU.”
“Ah, makes sense. Thank you.”
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While searching the room, Sigstein briefly wonders whether Scheisserle had children in life, and where their descendants might be now. The human genome does contain a quantifiable amount of neanderthal dna, after all. What, if anything, would those descendants be to him…? The spellcaster’s train of thought is interrupted, when he finds something that both speaks to him and is definitely out of place.
“Say, Pip, St. Niklaus brought you’re your lump of coal awfully early this year, no?”
Proudly displaying the ultimate testament of being a misbehaving child would be something the Villareal children might do, but not this girl. So why does the coal have such a prominent place in the room?
“Oh, no”, Pip giggles. “That’s my wishing rock! Aunt Angela gifted it to me, not Santa Claus!”
“Your wishing rock?” Sigstein sputters. “You mean the rock you used to create the Pequod scenario to play in?”
“Yes!”
“But why didn’t you tell us so?”
“Did, too! I TOLD you I WISHED for it!”
Ah, right. And to make wishes come true, one needed a wishing rock. The fact that Pip’s wishes had come true already implied that she owned a wishing rock. From the child’s perspective that was perfectly clear. Silly adults not to understand that simple logic!
“And your auntie Angela is…?”
“She’s navigator on a freighter, together with uncle Dustin! Everytime they come home to Detroit, they bring us gifts. The wishing rock they bought at a market in Lani St. Taz.”
“Lani St. Taz…” Sigstein whispers. “But the rock itself doesn’t come from that island, correct? It was found further inland? Like, on the main island? In the Belomisia jungle?”
Selvadorada in my lore is the largest of the four Sulani islands. The nowadays very different Sulani, Selvadoradan and Omiscan cultures have the same roots.
“Okay, I must confess I longed to make this speech for years”, the spellcaster admits, “but I didn’t expect I’d sit in a purple children’s desk chair while doing so, or that I’d be surrounded by cops.” He briefly considers, then reifies: “Or if cops were present in my idea of this scene, then I envisioned them bound and gagged. Maybe fishified.”
“Get to the point!” Tina snarls.
“Well, see, this “wishing rock” is the reason why I wanted to travel to Selvadorada six years ago. Why I broke into the museum, when you closed all escape routes for me.”
“I remember…” Hank slowly says. Indeed the memory of this particular case has never really faded for those involved in it. “We spotted you through a window, in the Selvadoradan section, holding a lump of clay.”
That happened during a murder mystery challenge. Sigstein had free will and played with clay while my investigators were chasing him. It looked as if he had stolen it from the exhibition.
“You spotted that correctly. I had to check whether the clay blob perhaps was a World Stone. Turned out it wasn’t.”
“The World… Stone?”
“It’s a legend, old as magic itself, some would say. It certainly dates back to the height of Omiscan rule and therefore magical research. Maybe it has inspired the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone, too. It’s properties are peculiar, to say the least.”
“C’mon, you are dying to tell us, to tell anybody! Spit it out already!”
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“For starters”, Sigstein starts elaborating, “a World Stone is always the same, in every parallel universe, down to the molecular level. It cannot get affected by outside forces in any way, shape or form, up to and including the heat death of the universe! World Stones may very well be what the next universe is getting born from every time!!!”
“Hey! Don’t get carried away!”
“Yeah, sorry.” Sigstein chuckles. “The problem is, there is no contemporary research on World Stones, even the Omiscan texts that mention them are of a later era already, so all we have to go by is legends. Or urban myths, like Professor Ember owning one…”
“Professor MORGYN Ember? Is that feasible?”
“Now more than before. A single World Stone bends reality in vague ways. But when two are close by, then you can look into parallel universes. Three have the power to open portals. What happened to us hints at, hm, there being two and a half World Stones in Detroit?”
“Half of an indestructible rock? How’s that possible?”
“See? That’s the problem right there. We know nothing. Let’s just grab the bad boy and leave here, okay?”
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Sigstein may have claimed that he knows “nothing”, but his twin, Captain Connor Anderson, knows at least this: That the rock is evidence. And evidence is to get stored for up to ten years. If it proves to be no more danger, then it is to get returned to the owners, otherwise destroyed. With the Wishing Rock/World Stone there is little chance of either – it doesn’t stop being a danger and it cannot get destroyed.
So for the time being it will lay on a shelf in the DPD’s evidence archive…
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…to occasionally get taken out and studied right next door, in the department for paranormal investigations. First by Detroit’s small circle of researchers of the occult, later by the MIT and later still by researchers from all around the globe.
Left to right: Jin Reed-Chen (Gavin’s and Tina’s Genius son), Lucy Klein (a seer), a smartspeaker that connects the department to the Institute for Paranormal Studies in Senbamachi led by Guidry, Morgyn Ember (aged to Adult), Sigstein Connor (Enchanter/Spellcaster) and The Garden Club Lady (the only permanent sage in this save, since I tend to accidently delete the other ones in my townie purges, Morgyn isn’t a sage in this reality)
The World Stone is loathe to divulge its secrets though, and there doesn’t turn up another one. It appears that the rock was able to bring its owners’ imagination to life only this one night, the night before All Hallows’ Eve, when the walls between the walls are naturally thin. Maybe the curious bipeds have to wait for the next time that happens? That would be Halloween 2051…
